I used to edit Innovation Management. My book, "The Elastic Enterprise", co-authored with Nick Vitalari and described as a must read for companies that want to succeed in the new era of business - looks at how stellar companies have gone beyond innovation to a new form of wealth creation. I speak on new innovation paradigms.
I started my writing career in broadcasting and then got involved in the EU's attempt to create an ARPA-type unit, where I managed downstream satellite application pilots, at just the time commercial satellite services entered the market. I also wrote policy, pre the Web, on broadband applications, 3G (before it was invented), and Wired Cities.
I have written for many major outlets like the Wall St Journal, Times, HBR, and GigaOm, as well as producing TV for the BBC, Channel 4 and RTE. I am a research fellow at the Center For Digital Transformation at UC Irvine, where I am also an advisory board member, advisory board member at Crowdsourcing.org and Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.
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The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives Revisited

Cisco/Chambers anticipated the need for radical adjacencies and if they screwed up it is partly explicable by the intense pressure of Asian competition and our general lack of familiarity with what makes radical adjacencies work.

So to the nub of it. Are these strategic failings of the companies down to a personality fault? Executives are having to navigate a unique economy. What they need, in general, is to understand the transformation moment in front of them (Whitman and Chambers got this wrong). They really do need to observe the Bill Joy rule if they are to make it through. The smartest people don’t work for them. But on the other hand it is easy to make a wrong call on adjacencies and this is a period when, uniquely, radical adjacencies are needed. Only the best will prosper in that environment.

What they need, to have a hope of getting it right, are people with invention skills who can understand the changes the economy is undergoing, identify the critical transformation moments, and build platform and ecosystem strategies to exploit them. Those strategies might take five to seven years to unfold and they will involve considerable ad libbing along the way.

They require executives to develop new data skills so they can make real time assessments of the market and they have to be able to manage large portfolios of options. In other words it is not just about finance or technology. It is about knowledge accrual more broadly and it is about knowing how to invent. No executive is trained for this so they must also be able to learn fast, and find people to learn with. And they need to build new corporate competencies that make radical adjacencies a breeze. I can’t imagine how all that can stand or fall on a simple character flaw but I can see why a CEO would resist the logic of it. The book on radical adjacencies has yet to be written.

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